


Florists Never Retire

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2016 [2]
Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Crack?, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:45:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6209449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken Hidaka gives up being an assassin and goes back to Japan to live out his days as a florist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Florists Never Retire

When Ken finally decided to give up assassination as his primary source of income, his life didn't change much. He moved back to Tokyo from London, because Tokyo would always be home, and after crashing at a hotel for a few days, found an old shop going under, and bought it with several decades' worth of blood money. And he reopened the flower shop. He didn't give it the same name, didn't use the same kitten logo, but it was the flower shop – living quarters above, shop on the main floor, training space below. (Just because he'd stopped killing didn't mean he was going to let himself go to seed.)

Now that he wasn't so young and handsome – though more than one person had commented on his blue-green eyes – there weren't throngs of teenage girls crowding the shop during non-school hours, but he did a brisk business for salarymen apologizing to their wives.

What he hadn't expected was, well, the boredom. Florist by day, assassin by night. That was how it had been for so long. Now at night he had...nothing. He was tempted to join a local soccer league, but if someone recognized him, his peaceful life would be over, so that wasn't an option. He wondered what other hobbies he could take up besides working out. Learn a new weapon? No. He'd given up killing. And even if he'd always fought with his primary weapon, he was plenty competent with other weapons.

When a flyer came in the mail for continuing education courses at a local college, Ken decided to try some. He took calligraphy and a chocolatier course, and business increased a little when customers learned that he could do lovely calligraphy on cards and that he sold hand-made chocolates to go with flowers. The evenings were spent making chocolates for the next day, so he had something to keep him busy, but he was a little lonely, so he started listening to podcasts.

When he found himself talking to the podcasters (who couldn't hear him), he knew he needed to get out and make friends. But he didn't really know how. He'd made friends with his teammates because it was make friends or be miserable, but he hadn't had to make friends since the orphanage, and the one friend he'd made there had betrayed him and tried to kill him and sent him into the arms of the organization that trained him to be an assassin, so clearly his friend-making skills needed some help.

Ken kept working in the flower shop, never hired anyone to help, because he could do it on his own. The shop made in a month what he'd made in a single kill back in the day, but it was breaking even, and he didn't need the money anyway.

He supposed he should have been surprised when Nagi wandered into the shop one day, but he wasn't. One moment he was another kid in skinny jeans with floppy hair obscuring half his face, and then Ken recognized those uncanny blue eyes.

"I thought you'd retired," Ken said.

Nagi flicked a glance at him, amused. "I thought the same of you."

"A florist never retires."

Nagi nodded. He looked up, then he reached up with his telekinesis and prodded a terra cotta pot further back on the shelf before it could topple over and hurt someone. "Need any help?"

Even though they'd been enemies for years and strangers for years after that, Ken said, "Yes."

The regulars took Nagi's addition to the staff with aplomb. Some of the older matrons tried to set him up on dates, but he refused with cool politeness. When Ran arrived on the doorstep with his sister in tow, Ken and Nagi were getting ready to close for the night. As a telekinetic, Nagi had a knack for making chocolates with multiple layers, and he'd taken to experimenting with white and dark chocolate in the kitchen while Ken practiced his calligraphy.

"Ken!" Aya cried. It was still so strange to think of her as Aya after her brother had used her name while she was comatose. But Ken stepped around the counter and hugged her hello anyway.

"Do you have anyone doing ikebana?" Ran asked.

"No," Ken said. That had been Ran's specialty, back in the day. "Nagi does deliveries sometimes, but we could use someone to do deliveries full time."

"I'll do it!" Aya cried. "I have my own scooter and everything."

Ken smiled. "All right. Welcome to the team."

Aya went upstairs to pick out her bedroom, and Ran lingered behind.

"You said you were going to retire," Ran said. He'd been less than pleased when Ken left London and the Side B team.

"I have," Ken said.

Ran arched an eyebrow at the cooler full of flowers.

"From the other thing," Ken said.

Ron nodded. "Okay. Me too." And he went upstairs to find his own room.

Crawford, Schuldig, and Farfarello arrived as a group. Schuldig and Ran had a brief stand-off until Aya got in the middle and made them hug and apologize. It said something about how much all of them had changed over the years, that they complied. Ken welcomed them onto the team, and now the living quarters were getting a little crowded, so they agreed to convert the basement to more bedrooms and just buy memberships at the local gym, because all of them insisted on staying fit.

Crawford did little to contribute to the daily running of the shop. Instead he lounged around, read books, suggested snippets of romantic poetry for cards, and used his precognitive skills to predict when a nasty rush was about to happen and how to invest their money. Schuldig would sometimes lure customers into the shop with his telepathy during lulls, which Aya and Ken always scolded him for, but he made himself useful by taking continuing education classes in accounting and taking over the books not just for the shop but for everyone's individual fortunes as well. It turned out that Farfarello had a beautiful singing voice, so they started sending him out on flower deliveries for special singing telegrams once in a while. Otherwise he kept in the back, unloading deliveries and sharpening tools.

None of them were surprised when the news ran a story about Mamoru Takatori stepping down as head of the Takatori business empire and vanishing. They were expecting the moment when Omi Tsukiyono showed up in the shop one day, pretending to browse for flowers but really waiting till the crowd thinned out so he could talk to them.

"Still florists, then?" he asked when the last customer left.

"Florists for life," Ken said solemnly.

"Got room for one more?"

"Nagi's been saying he'll open an online store for months, but he's too busy with the chocolate-making," Schuldig said.

Omi smiled, and Ken let him back behind the counter, and retirement was going to be okay after all. It was calm and quiet, occasionally full of laughter and smiles, but it was never boring.

He wasn't expecting the day, decades later, when all but Nagi were gray-haired, that a familiar man shuffled into the shop.

"Hey," he said. "You got room to take on anyone part time? My wife says now that I've retired I'm driving her crazy, and she wants me to get a job, and I've always been pretty good with flowers, so."

Yohji didn't recognize them, didn't remember them. But Ken smiled and said, "Sure. How's your Victorian flower language?"

"Pretty good, actually," not-Yohji-anymore said.

"Then welcome to the team."

"Thanks." Yohji accepted the dark blue apron and went to tie it on. "So, have you always been a florist?"

"Pretty much all my life," Ken said.

"Are you ever going to retire?"

"This from the old man who just asked for a job," Ken said, and Yohji laughed.

"Touché."

Ken said, "Florists never retire." He was glad some assassins could.


End file.
